If you're going to Rhodes Field to catch a soccer game, I offer one piece of advice: Bring food. Penn is the only school I know of at which you can attend a Division I soccer game and not be able to buy any food or drink within a half-mile radius of the field.
It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that Penn's soccer games are some of the least-attended in the Ivy League. A quick comparison of average attendance relative to undergraduate student-body size confirms the bad news: The men's team comes in seventh in that metric.
The team below Penn, Cornell, is arguably the worst in the league. (The Big Red has won a mere six Ivy games in their last five full years.) Penn, by contrast, is actually a team worth watching. The Quakers have been nationally ranked during the past two years and are challenging for the Ivy title this year.
Yet even lowly Columbia has drawn more fans per game this year than Penn. Most of our other sports, like baseball, don't fare so well either. And as Norries Wilson told us on Saturday, it's certainly not because Columbia students are more supportive of their athletes than Penn students.
The most frustrating part is that the solutions to this problem aren't expensive or overambitious schemes. They are just simple accommodations that make an athletic event more attractive to the casual fan.
It's astounding to me that Penn hosts dozens of sporting events, year after year, that have no concession stand or place to buy food at. When I say the nearest food is a half-mile away, I'm not exaggerating much: You have to trek up to the food trucks at Franklin Field, a good eight-minute walk from Rhodes Field.
Once again, it's not just soccer - there isn't so much as a vending machine in the entire athletic complex that borders the Schuylkill River. (Don't expect peanuts or Cracker Jacks if you go to Meiklejohn Stadium for a baseball game. The same holds for Warren Field and softball games.)
As Penn fans have demonstrated from football games, the food doesn't even have to be cheap or good. Aramark Corp. gouges its customers at Franklin Field, charging an exorbitant $3 for a bottle of water and $6 for a chicken meal rivaled in quality by McDonalds. Still, suckers like me who forget to eat or drink before the game will queue up at half-time and open their wallets anyway.
Nor does selling food have to be an elaborate ordeal. When I covered last year's Penn-Brown game in Providence, R.I., for this newspaper, the temperature was 40 degrees and the game was played under a deluge of sleet and freezing rain. There was only one concession vendor, and his stand was nothing special. But he made a killing selling hot chocolate from his little hut to a grateful crowd of a hundred or so; Brown's athletic department said this is standard for games held on colder nights.
It's no surprise that the Bears are first in the league in attendance and attendance per capita despite charging $5 a ticket.
Imagine the business Alex's Lemonade Stand or the sorority bake sale I saw on Locust Walk yesterday could do if the athletics department invited them to Rhodes Field.
Penn athletics did make a start with their annual "Student Day at Penn Soccer." The promotion for the event was hardly earth-shattering: It consisted of an e-mail to the athletics mailing list, a raffle for a $50 gift certificate to the Penn Bookstore and a few lonely looking bags of peanuts and pretzels.
Still, Penn's attendance figure for that game was a healthy 354, the second-highest total on the year. If the women's game hadn't forced the men into an awkward 5 p.m. kickoff, that number would have been even higher.
Ivy League athletes are a special group. They aren't hired guns like the scholarship athletes at other universities, but they still compete with those paid players at the highest levels in many sports.
Considering that most could take their athletic services elsewhere and be paid to do so, they deserve the full support of the school's athletics department. Penn generally does a good job of backing up its athletes, but it could do so much better with relatively little effort.
Penn should take a page from Brown's book and try harder to fill its stands; the school could start by getting some food to next Saturday's crucial soccer match against the Bears.
It sure would be nice if the athletics department gave its players the same support Brown gave its team against Penn on that cold, rainy night in Providence.
Sebastien Angel is a College sophomore from Worcester, Mass. His e-mail address is angel@dailypennsylvanian.com. Overnight Celebrity appears on Wednesdays.
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